Memorable Mints

Here’s an idea to gain greater buy in for a leader’s vision. Reading time: 3:14.

Think of the Sandbox on the playground the next time you’re rolling out your company vision for all employees to buy into.

Encourage your employees to parlay the creative process in the Sandbox as long as it remains situated on the same playground (a.k.a. your company’s founding principles) you built years ago.

The playground is your company’s playing field –where you compete in the marketplace, where your company’s principles and policies are deeply embedded and where your Sandbox is a fixture in your corporate culture.

Your Sandbox is a DESIGNated area for creative endeavor where employees can exercise their creativity and unleash their imaginations with the Sandbox.

In time, employers build their proverbial sand castles in a celebration of diversity in thought and action and an eruption of the collaboration of so many hands, hearts and heads working together.

The most effective leaders use the proverbial Sandbox Playing metaphor to promote employee creatively while preserving the focus and direction of the vision tha t by definition is both limiting and liberating with a vision, employees to free it.

The Sandbox concept integrates in the Playground can also offer a practical area for innovation.

The most effective leaders dedicate and equip Sandboxes in strategic areas around their organizations where the best and brightest can create, generate and innovate. So the CEO and others in executive management define and differentiate what Sandbox employees get to play in and to preserve and protect their Sandbox.

Then if market conditions change, if the winds pick up and the waves start to crash, the Sandbox has to get moved through a well-planned strategic process. And top management has to also provide the sand pails and shovels and other tools for the Sandbox.

Then top management gets out of that way and let’s the employees play in the san. Let employees creatively develop their own personal vision/mission that dovetails what is feasible and profitable in the Sandbox.

Let employees recognized their responsibility to creative competitively. Make sure all creative initiatives are clearly positioned to add value to the customer who of course can shop at the Sandbox of his or her choice.

Watch kids play in a sand box and you will see collaborative learning. One 5-year-old said he was building his “dream city.” Another 5-year old said “Okay I will build the road so we can have people come to our city.” Another boy said “I will build the castle here.” A little girl added: “I ‘ll build the moat around the castle.”

All of the children in the sandbox found a way to dig in and realize their view in plying their vision, of parlaying their creative energy and of playing together interdependently on their playground.